The Endorsement: Not Drinking

Whenever I've had a rough week, my buddy Bill will say, "You need to watch me drink a martini." And he's right. We head to one of his haunts, I sip a club soda while he slurps a Chopin, and, sure enough, I start to relax. Bill orders another. I order dinner. Bill starts working the first girl he sees, saying something like, "Come on, baby, just lemme touch your ankle," and gradually the bar fills in around us, people growing louder, laughing and lying and shouting their deepest secrets, and all at once I feel as if everything is going to be fine.

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Though I quit drinking fifteen years ago, I still enjoy the company of drinkers, and I still believe in the pleasures a bar can provide, particularly for the nondrinker. Secondhand smoke is deadly, but secondhand drinking is fun, and it's a lack of fun that often undoes the sobriety novice. Newly sober people need to redouble their efforts to find fun in each day. For instance, if I'd given up bars along with booze, I'd have been elsewhere the night a barfly tapped Bill's arm and asked, "Remember me?" "No--should I?" Bill said. "Yeah," the guy said. "You should. You fucked my wife."

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Fun.

Not just any bar will do for the nondrinker. When you're as sober as a judge, you're more judgmental. I'm as picky about bars as I am about people, and I avoid certain ones for the same reasons--too loud, too sketchy, too smelly. Right after I stopped drinking, however, I frequented a loud, sketchy, smelly dive called Duffy's, because no one there noticed that I wasn't drinking. No one at Duffy's noticed anything but the glass directly before him. The bar was as dark as a sewer, two deep with zombies, and there was always a kung-fu movie blaring on the TV. My friend Joe and I would smoke cigars, stare at a runty guy we called Thalidomide Boy, and hurl trivia questions at a Napoleonic polymath dressed all in black whom we anointed World's Smartest Man, and soon it wasn't just the patrons who didn't notice I wasn't drinking. I stopped noticing.

I quit drinking when I wanted to, not when I had to, so bars don't tempt me or haunt me as they might someone else. They comfort me, and I know a few recovering alcoholics who feel likewise--including bartenders. Sam Malone was archetype, not aberration. No matter who you are, after you give up hangovers you still need hangouts, and isn't that the point of Alcoholics Anonymous? Doesn't the AA meeting look from afar like a barroom? Everyone sitting around, telling their story, amid billows of cigarette smoke. Add a kung-fu movie and you've got Duffy's.

There's an Edward Hopper painting: Corner Saloon. It's a gin mill on a New York street, door thrown wide open, blurry figures in dark coats rushing past. The grimy air, the bleak street, the wan despair of it all chills you and makes you fix your gaze on that door. You can't help but feel that on the other side lies something better, something that might change your whole outlook, or at least make you laugh. And I promise you, there is. Even if it's just Joe and World's Smartest Man trying to name McGovern's running mate or the surprisingly large number of Cy Young winners who've been arrested or the parts of the human body that have three letters--eye, ear, leg, et cetera. (There are ten in all, and if you can name them in under an hour, you're a genius.)